Google Leads in Global Search, But Rivals Are on Radar

On Wednesday, comScore released its first-ever worldwide search patterns report, which indicates that while Google remains the go-to search engine for most users in the world, China's Baidu.com and South Korea's NHN Corp. have managed to crack the top five. The comScore qSearch 2.0 service shows that over 37.1 billion searches went through Google in August, representing about 60% of all searches. That figure beat Google's 50% U.S. result for that month. Yahoo was a distant second with 8.5 billion, followed by Baidu with 3.3 billion, Microsoft with 2.2 billion and NHN with 2 billion. Though the figures offer what Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, calls "an extremely rough guide" to the state of the industry, they are not believed to provide a financial picture. "This is a data set that investors understand has its useful purpose, and predicting quarterly (financial) results is not its useful purpose," said Rob Sanderson of American Technology Research. Still, comScore's new computational method "more accurately measures search traffic sources that are core to customer engagement and enables advertisers to get the most out of search," according to Brad Goldberg, general manager of search marketing at Microsoft’s search unit.